POPEYE (1980)

As the seventies came to a close and a new day was dawning on Hollywood, filmmakers and studios began to shift their work and business models to better prepare for the type of film they needed to make. Sure, the point of any movie studio at any time in the history of motion pictures had […]

HealtH (1980)

When you begin to consider the high-level talent that went into the formula that produced Robert Altman’s HealtH, it’s difficult to recall another movie in film history that was, and continues to be, treated as poorly. Coming directly after Altman’s twin failures of 1979, Quintet and A Perfect Couple, its production was relatively quick and on-the-fly; an […]

A PERFECT COUPLE (1979)

Coming off the universally reviled and glum Quintet, Robert Altman began to move back toward the warmth of human relationships with A Perfect Couple, a lighthearted romantic-comedy that tracks a mismatched couple through a series of sweet-natured misadventures as they connect, decouple, and reconnect. Put against Paul Newman’s fight for survival in a world not […]

QUINTET (1979)

O.C. and Stiggs aside, if there is another movie in the canon of Robert Altman that has been as torched and reviled as Quintet, first in a pair of films Altman released in 1979, I know it not. Laughed out of the theaters and dismissed upon its initial release, Quintet now camps comfortably at the […]

A WEDDING (1978)

Robert Altman understands that weddings are semi-goofy affairs where, each year, a whole lot of money is dropped on lavish, nerve-wracking, anxiety-inducing ceremonies, (and even more unthinkably gaudy receptions), all in the service of unions that have less than a 50% chance of succeeding. He’s also keen on the notion that all weddings are secret […]

BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON (1976)

At the conclusion of Nashville, the camera pans upward into the high heavens and the last image we see before staring off into the ether is the American flag. So it is appropriate that, at the beginning of Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, the film that was released the following […]

THIEVES LIKE US (1974)

If Nicholas Ray’s 1948’s masterful film noir They Live By Night was the true cinematic template for the “doomed lovers on the run” subgenre of films that eventually led to Arthur Penn’s revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, then Robert Altman’s Thieves Likes Us brings it all back full circle. By adopting the Bonnie and […]

CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974)

“Pal… I’m gonna win!!!” So says George Segal’s Bill Denny as he’s being flattened by the pressures of his overdue gambling debts, his irritated bookie, and being stuck in the unenviable position of having run out of personal items to sell for gambling money. It should also be said that he’s been on one hell […]

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

Philip Marlowe has been asleep. Whether it’s been a literal and continuous Big Sleep that has lasted since 1946 is unclear. But there are clues scattered about which suggest that it is. First off, genius screenwriter Leigh Brackett is back with another adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel just as she was all those years […]

IMAGES (1972)

Robert Altman was once quoted as saying that, to him, his entire filmography was one whole movie with each individual film a chapter. If this is true, Images, the lone horror film in his career, is a very pivotal chapter in that string as it reflects backwards on characters already introduced while also projecting forward […]